Physicians, third party payers and patients are all stakeholders in the health care system. All participate in decision making, all have an interest in successful outcomes and all are cognizant of costs and cost benefits. The present invention (sometimes referred to herein as the “Daily Dose”) will have a positive impact on healthcare outcomes and the costs of drug inventory, distribution, customer purchase, as well as safety, use and treatment.
Major obstacles with drug dispensing include the increasing cost of the drugs, followed by prescribing and dispensing errors, followed by poor patient compliance, i.e., whether or not the patient has faithfully taken all of the prescribed pills over the entire course of time for which they were prescribed. Poor patient compliance leads to enormous costs with respect to wasted drugs and sub-optimal treatments. The effects of sub-optimal treatments can be exponential as they may lead to lingering or recurrent illness(es), thus demanding more doctor visits, more hospitalization and more surgical and/or medical treatment.
Prior art devices that dispense articles, specifically medication, fail to fully address these problems. Rather, prior art medication dispensers are generally of a small scale which makes it difficult for a patient, especially an elderly, arthritic or handicapped patient, to retrieve pills from the device. Also, a number of prior art dispensers only dispense one pill at a time. Examples of devices that dispense a single pill per day can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,533,371; 3,495,567; and 3,743,085. Further, prior art pill dispensers, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,276,573 and 6,564,945 include deformable blisters, which, in reality, are difficult for many patients to use. Again, patients such as the elderly, arthritic and handicapped commonly struggle with medication sealed within a blister package.
Many prior art devices, such as that described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,039,080, are characterized by a box-like configuration, which makes it difficult for the patient to reach into the particular box containing medication. Additionally, tablets, pills or capsules may become caught, trapped, or positioned in these devices so as to render retrieval and use difficult. This obliges the user to turn, flip, invert, tap or adjust the device in various ways which risks or inevitably leads to having the oral medication, for example, pills, spill out of the container, or become intermixed, or damaged or lost.
The present invention overcomes these notable challenges by providing an apparatus for dispensing articles, in most instances oral medication, that allows the patient to easily select or identify what medication needs to be taken and when. In addition, the present invention allows for safe, easy and simple access to and dispensing of said medication.